Author: victorhanson

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture.

Is Kim Jong-un an Evil Buffoon or an Evil Genius?

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The Corner

The one and only.

by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

 

Kim Jong-un has accomplished something that neither his grandfather nor father pulled off during the last 70 years: bringing an existential threat to the shores of the United States. North Korea’s handful of missiles that are soon to be pointed our way will be seen as posing a greater existential threat than do the far more numerous nuclear-tipped missiles of Russia and China — on the premise that by feigning (?) madness Kim is far more likely to use them. How weird that the really dangerous adversaries are seen as posing a far lesser danger than the far weaker one. Iran is looking at all this as a tutorial.

 

That fact alone has changed completely the strategic calculus of the Korean peninsula. Almost every decision that the U.S. will now make, as opposed to those of the last seven decades, will hinge on the premise that a nuclear nut can now threaten the lives of millions on the U.S. West Coast. Even in the age of North Korean technological incompetence and American high-tech excellence, a sophisticated society assumes it cannot live with the idea that there is a 1-2 percent chance that a lone North Korean nuclear missile — due to a supposedly insane finger on the button that claims it is indifferent to threats of U.S. massive retaliation — could at any moment actually get through U.S. defenses to reach Pacific Heights or South Central LA.

 

The result is that inevitably there will be a growing disconnect between South Korean and American strategic concerns, as our own policy will focus on the ramifications not just in terms of the sanctity of Seoul, but of the U.S. mainland. Such a shift in emphasis will be manipulated not just by North Korea but China as well as they insidiously remind South Korea that the U.S. is predicating its Korean strategy now solely in terms of its own self-interests. We should expect in the future lots of trial-balloon diplomacy from China suggesting U.S. troops vacate South Korea or a demilitarization of the peninsula, all predicated on the idea that Kim’s new gambit can be used to gain lots of concessions in the interest of “peace.”

 

How we came to this juncture is a tale of 30 years of bipartisan failure, or, to paraphrase Machiavelli, it is easier to cure a disease in its adolescence when its symptoms are harder to detect, but nearly impossible once there is no doubt about it pernicious presence.

 

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From An Angry Reader:

Often, as in debates with flat Earth proponents, global warming denier, the mentally ill, or the Vatican persecution of Galileo, it is quite simply ludicrous to champion “fair and balanced” coverage, validating both sides’ integrity. What one needs is a fire alarm. When the Mooch’s head rolls, you will make an excellent apologist replacement. Enjoy the Emperor’s new clothes.

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Angry Reader Matt Dross,

The key to letter-writing is coherence. Yours, sadly, is abjectly incoherent. So you equate skepticism over whether carbon releases have radically heated the planet in a way unknown during past radical fluctuations in climate, and are now reaching lethal levels demanding that governments radically curb the use of heat-releasing appliances and machines—with mental illness?

If you knew a tiny bit of history, you would find yourself in creepy company with those who rejected fair and balanced debate, given the certainty of their theories, and of course, with those whose sanctimoniousness demanded any means necessary (in your case the end of disinterested coverage) to achieve supposedly noble ends.

How the demise of the “Mooch” has anything to do with this question, only you apparently know.

Sincerely,

VDH

The Problem of Competitive Victimhood

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by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review

Divisive identity politics are fading in favor of a shared American identity.

The startling 2016 presidential election weakened the notion of tribal identity rather than a shared American identity. And it may have begun a return to the old idea of unhyphenated Americans.

Many working-class voters left the Democratic party and voted for a billionaire reality-TV star in 2016 because he promised jobs and economic growth first, a new sense of united Americanism second, and an end to politically correct ethnic tribalism third. Continue reading “The Problem of Competitive Victimhood” →

Miracle At Dunkirk

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by Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas
Wednesday, August 2, 2017

A quarter-million troops of the British Expeditionary Force, together with about 140,000 French and Belgian soldiers, were safely evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk, France between May 26 and June 4, 1940, in one of the largest successful maritime evacuations of trapped armies in military history. Most other marooned armies would likely have surrendered or been slaughtered on the beach by the seasoned German Panzers.

The amazingly successful withdrawal allowed Britain to remain actively in the war, and gave inspiration for another quarter-million trapped British and French soldiers to escape across the channel in the next three weeks. Churchill, in the Periclean fashion of mixing encouragement with realist caution, reminded the beleaguered British people that such defiance presaged successful British resistance to Hitler—while also reminding them that victory is never won through retreats.

There is much to be said for the current blockbuster movie Dunkirk, directed by Christopher Nolan. The cinematography of battle is excellent. The themes of confusion, paradox, irony, and unintended consequences in war are well captured through the mostly visual daylong odyssey of “Tommy” (Fionn Whitehead). In near continual silence (dialogue is scant in Dunkirk), Tommy seems to escape one disaster only to fall into another, in his Odysseus-like effort to get across the water to home.

To read more: http://www.hoover.org/research/miracle-dunkirk?utm_source=hdr&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2017-08-03

Trump — And the Use and Abuse of Madness

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By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review

Fiery and unpredictable rhetoric can be a powerful strategic tool, but only if it’s not habitual.

Occasionally insanity, real or feigned, has its political advantages —largely because of its ancillary traits of unpredictability and an aura of immunity from appeals to reason, sobriety, and moderation.

Rogues often try to appear as crazy as mad hatters — sometimes defined by issuing threats, throwing temper tantrums, saying outrageous things, dressing weirdly, or acting peculiarly. Continue reading “Trump — And the Use and Abuse of Madness” →

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Why is Everyone Suddenly Quoting Thucydides?

By | American Greatness

Currently, the historian Thucydides is the object of debate among those within the Trump Administration and its critics, who, like scholars of the last three millennia, focus on lots of differing Thucydidean personas.

Did Thucydides warn in deterministic fashion about ascendant powers like Athens that disrupt the existing order of Sparta and its Peloponnesian League—and thus prompt preventive attacks from established nations (“the Thucydides trap”)?

Is the historian thus a guide to how to handle a rising China? Or did he remind us how wrong-headed (but nonetheless free and correctable) choices can turn a tense situation into a catastrophe?

Was Thucydides, an admiral and man of action, a voice of the aristocratic elite, or sympathetic toward small landowners who were neither oligarchic nor radically democratic?

Translated into modern terms, was he like-minded with the contemporary elite Washington establishment or a likely supporter of what are now the forgotten Red-State middle classes between the coasts?

Did he despise the reckless democracy that exiled him, or develop a grudging respect for its dynamism and powers of recovery from its own self-inflicted wounds—and become especially complimentary of Periclean leaders who can act forcefully within democratic checks and balances?

Some 2,400 years after Thucydides wrote the Peloponnesian War, scholars still argue over why and how he crafted his history. Continue reading →

Republicans and the Lost Art of Deterrence

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By | American Greatness

In a perfect and disinterested world, when Washington, D.C. is deluged in scandal, a nonpartisan investigator or prosecutor should survey the contemporary rotten landscape. He would then distinguish the likely guilty from the probably falsely accused—regardless of the political consequences at stake.

In the real cosmos of Washington, however, the majority party—the group that controls the House, Senate, presidency, and U.S. Supreme Court—if it were necessary, would de facto appoint the government’s own special investigatory team, and then allow it to follow where leads dictate. Its majority status would assure that there were no political opponents in control of the investigations, keen on turning an inquiry into a political circus. That cynical reality is known as normal D.C. politics.

But in contemporary Republican La-La Land, the party in power with control over all three branches of government allows its minority-status opponents to dictate the rules of special investigations and inquiry—a Jeff Sessions recused, a Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) excused from his investigations of unmasking and leaking, a Robert Mueller appointed as special counsel, friend of to-be-investigated James Comey, and employer of partisan attorneys.

Is naiveté the cause of such laxity? Do Republicans unilaterally follow Munich rules because they hope such protocols will create a new “civility” and “bipartisan cooperation” in Washington?

Demonizing Resistance 
Or is the culprit civil dissension among the ranks, as the congressional leadership secretly has no real incentive to help the despised outsider Trump? When Republicans get re-elected on repealing and replacing Obamacare during the assured Obama veto-presidency, and then flip in the age of surety that Trump would reify their campaign boasts, should we laugh or cry? Is the Republican establishment’s aim to see Trump’s agenda rendered null and void—or does intent even matter when the result is the same anyway?

Or is the empowerment of progressive conspiracy-mongering due to fear of the mainstream media, which demonizes principled resistance to progressivism and lauds unprincipled surrender to it? Continue reading “Republicans and the Lost Art of Deterrence” →

Trump’s Circular Firing Squad

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By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review

Trump and his critics are attacking each other, failing to focus on the only story that counts: the welfare of the United States.

The American political system has never quite seen anything like the current opposition to President Trump and his unusual reaction to it.

We are no longer in the customary political landscape. Usually, the out-of-power opposition — in this case, the Democratic party — offers most of the criticism and all of the alternative policies in order to win in the next election. Instead, Trump has an entire circle of diverse critics shooting at him. But they just as often end up hitting one another — and themselves. Continue reading “Trump’s Circular Firing Squad” →

Sessions, P.S.

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The Corner: The one and only.

By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review

Donald Trump’s core support is found among those who want existing immigration laws enforced, an end to state-rights nullification of federal law, and no more legal adventurism that seeks to create new laws ex nihilo. Sessions, in these regards, has been excellent. Even the thought of letting him go is already fracturing Trump’s base; his dismissal would seriously wound the administration at precisely the time it needs cohesion on the health-care and tax-reform debates. Trump apparently has forgotten that one of the reasons he retains support, and why there are several indications that real positive change is in the works, are his excellent seasoned cabinet appointees such as Sessions.

The beneficiary of Sessions’s continued tenure is Trump himself. Continue reading “Sessions, P.S.” →

Trashing Jeff Sessions — Enough Already

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The Corner: The one and only.

by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

 

President Trump has made the point for the nth time that the recusal of Jeff Sessions on matters of alleged Russian collusion invariably led to a series of events that culminated in the appointment of Robert Mueller, a prior associate of James Comey’s, to investigate Trump with a veritable blank check and a cadre of mostly liberal attorneys, fueled by a hysterical media ready to make them all Watergate-like folk heroes if they come to Beltway-correct conclusions. I fear we could soon be in Lawrence Walsh/Javert territory.

 

So in retrospect, the recusal was probably a political mistake, given that a seemingly principled decision — most observers in the administration at the time seemed to think that Sessions’s recusal at least temporarily silenced the baying wolves — was soon seen by anti-Trumpers as weakness to be exploited (the subsequent hysterical media-driven feeding frenzy quickly turned on everyone from Representative Devin Nunes to Trump’s own family) rather than probity to be appreciated. Sessions’s own current remarkable Stoicism in the context of Trump’s attacks perhaps reflects that had he to do it over again in light of what followed, he might have not recused himself.

 

But all that said, Trump is said to value loyalty and competence. And Sessions is the epitome of both. He was a force for immigration enforcement and an advocate of the ignored muscular working classes long before Trump; it was his advocacy of these issues which drew him to Trump’s 2016 populist campaign, and prompted his early and almost solitary support for Trump. He is a good man with the legal and political experience to make the fundamental changes at the Justice Department that returns it to enforcement of existing laws rather than its past errant role under Holder and Lynch of a creator of progressive agendas masquerading as an enforcement agency.

 

Politically, Trump made his point. Again, any further public criticism of Sessions undermines two of Trump’s strengths, acknowledged even by his enemies: one, that he is loyal to those even under fire who were willing to take a risk and support him when few would; and, two, he has a proven ability to appoint superb professionals who know what they are doing and yet are not part of the deep state (McMaster, Mattis, Pompeo, etc.).

 

It’s past time to let Sessions do his job and move on.

 

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/449810/donald-trump-jeff-sessions-tweets-criticism

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